music and smarts (or lack thereof)

Don't remember how I stumbled across it, but I discovered an attention-grabbing blog post* a while back. It highlights an interesting take on how music preferences match up with SAT scores. The guy who put the data together doesn't claim it's some sort of rigorous scientific study, of course, but it is cool nonetheless. He has a chart for books too, though I didn't look at it much. That's a future blog post I suspect.

As for me, most of the musical preferences on his scores chart that I identified with were pretty much right in the middle. But "Rock," "Classic Rock," and "Country" (closest thing to bluegrass) were all on the bottom half, which doesn't bode well for me insofar as it correlates to intellect. So I guess I'm just kinda boring like that when it comes to music. I don't like that cult-following type music (Sufjan, Radiohead, etc.) and I don't like hip-hop/rap/R&B either, so I guess that knocks out a lot of the bands that deviate off the mean the most.

A few things did jump out at me though...

- Beethoven is way out on the high end, while "Classical" is on the lower end. Weird. So if you're gonna listen to classical music to up your smarts then make sure it's Beethoven.

- What the bleep is Billy Joel doing so far out on the right?? That stuff kills brain cells as fast as anything out there, I'm sure of it! I mean, don't you just feel dumber after hearing a Billy Joel song? Come on, I know I'm not the only one. And come to think of it, how's he listed in the top 133 Facebook music preferences? Are there that many Billy Joel fans who know how to use computers?

- Out of his 133 entries, I counted 10 bands that I'd label as "Christian"--and there may be more, given that I've never heard of a few of those on the chart and I don't listen to the CCM-type stuff enough to know the "hot" bands. I'm a little surprised the number is that high though. I would have been surprised to see half that many, given that the other bands are all quite popular. But maybe those CCM bands are too and I'm just totally out of the loop.

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* Ironically, the blog is co-authored by one of my pastors. How cool is that!? But don't hold that against him or his blog; he is very good and knowledgeable. He can't be held responsible for a few bad apples in the bunch, you know...

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